A decision by the United States to indefinitely retain oversight of the main computers that control Internet traffic drew concerns Friday from foreign officials, many of whom want an international body in charge instead.
A Japanese official termed Thursday’s announcement “not entirely necessary.”
“When the Internet is being increasingly utilized for private use, by businesses and so forth, there is a societal debate about whether it’s befitting to have one country maintaining checks on that,” said Masahiko Fujimoto of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ data communications division. “It’s likely to fuel that debate.”
The U.S. announcement marked a departure from previously stated U.S. policy.
Michael D. Gallagher, assistant secretary for communications and information at the Commerce Department, shied away from terming the declaration a reversal, calling it instead “the foundation of U.S. policy going forward.”
“The signals and words and intentions and policies need to be clear so all of us benefiting in the world from the Internet and in the U.S. economy can have confidence there will be continued stewardship,” Gallagher told The Associated Press on Thursday.
He said the declaration, officially made in a four-paragraph statement posted online, was in response to growing security threats and increased reliance on the Internet globally for communications and commerce.
The computers in question serve as the Internet’s master directories and tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic. Internet users around the world interact with them every day, likely without knowing it. Policy decisions could at a stroke make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable.
Though the computers themselves — 13 in all, known as “root” servers — are in private hands, they contain government-approved lists of the 260 or so Internet suffixes, such as “.com.”
In 1998, the Commerce Department selected a private organization with international board members, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to decide what goes on those lists. Commerce kept veto power, but indicated it would let go once ICANN met a number of conditions.
Thursday’s declaration means Commerce would keep that control, regardless of whether and when those conditions are met.
“It’s completely an about-face if you consider the original commitment made when ICANN was created,” said Milton Mueller, a Syracuse University professor who has written about policies surrounding the Internet’s root servers.
ICANN officials said they were still reviewing Commerce’s statement, which also expressed continued support of ICANN for day-to-day operations.
Europeans welcomed that support of ICANN, but urged the United States to explore ways to further decentralize control such that management of country codes are left to local governments and technical administrators, said Paul Kane, chairman of the Council for European and National Top-Level Registries, a Brussels-based coalition of domain name administrators.
Fujimoto, the Japanese official, indicated the U.S. decision is likely to alienate many in the international community.
“There have been strong opinions that essentially allowing the United States alone to check this process is not right given the nature of the Internet today,” Fujimoto said.
The declaration won’t immediately affect Internet users, but it puts in writing what some critics had already feared.
Michael Froomkin, a University of Miami professor who helps run an independent ICANN watchdog site, said the date for relinquishing control has continually slipped.
In a worst-case scenario, countries refusing to accept U.S. control could establish their own separate Domain Name System and thus fracture the Internet into more than one network. That means two users typing the same domain name could reach entirely different Web sites, depending on where they are.
The announcement comes just weeks before a U.N. panel is to release a report on Internet governance, addressing such issues as oversight of the root servers, ahead of November’s U.N. World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
Some countries have pressed to move oversight to an international body, such as the U.N. International Telecommunication Union, although the U.S. government has historically had that role because it funded much of the Internet’s early development.
Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department, insisted that Thursday’s announcement was unrelated to those discussions.
But he said other countries should see the move as positive because “uncertainty is not something that we think is in the United States’ interest or the world’s interest.”
Gallagher noted that Commerce endorses having foreign governments manage their own country-code suffixes, such as “.fr” for France.
